Outliers 27: A masterclass from Sridhar Vembu in building a successful company without VC money

In today’s fast paced, startup-frenzied world, Zoho cofounder Sridhar Vembu is clearly an Outlier — he believes in “slow laddering” or building a company slowly, one step at a time. And to top that, he’s even shunned the venture capital monies and said “no” to an over $25 million acquisition offer from Salesforce.com during the early days of Zoho. Zoho offers a cloud software suite and SaaS applications for businesses.

With estimated revenues of over $300 million and more than 30 million users of its products, if Zoho were to be valued today, it would be over $1 billion dollars without any doubt. But Vembu believes in building institutions such as Honda, learning from Japan’s biggest, long-lasting companies.

After nearly a couple of years of chasing him, I finally managed to sit down with Vembu on Tuesday in Chennai for the Outliers podcast. It’s a long — nearly an hour — conversation that can as well be termed “a masterclass” in building a globally successful enterprise without any venture money.

Even as Indian SaaS companies struggle to perfect the art of selling to the world, raise money, or strike partnerships, a new breed of companies that use artificial intelligence are threatening to upend their plans.

As I sat down with him to record this episode of Outliers, I decided to stay away from analysing all the decisions he’s taken in his career and, instead, try and understand Murthy’s decision-making framework.